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A life in the
football wilderness
by Justin Bryant
Bennion Kearny, £6.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 320 October 2013
Unknown American goalkeeper Justin Bryant begins his memoir in the middle of a nature reserve watching alligators, describing the “sheer improbability [of] these Jurassic river dragons”. That’s the first thing that strikes you about Bryant – he doesn’t need a ghostwriter. And he’d be the first to admit that’s just as well, because his football career didn’t pay him enough to afford one.
There have been a good number of books by lower-level players in recent years describing the nitty-gritty of life at the game’s hard end, and long may struggling ex-pros continue to counter the egregious banality of the mailed-in Premier League star’s cynical book, hacked out in a few days for a six-figure advance. Small Time is an excellent prototype for any former player with a good story to tell. Bryant is honest, thoughtful, economic and introspective enough to realise his own shortcomings as a player and a person.
Growing up a fan of the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the North American Soccer League, and idolising goalkeeper Winston DuBose, Bryant becomes a decent high school goalkeeper and wins a scholarship to Radford University in Virginia. There his “sudden, terrible temper” during games wins him few friends and his scholarship is rescinded because of low grades. He returns to Florida, “a college flameout with no job”, and starts to play for the Orlando Lions, a team of college and ex-pro players that includes DuBose. From here on it’s a fragmented, frustrated career that takes him to various clubs including Brentford, Boreham Wood and Dunfermline Athletic, punctuated by spells back in Florida, all the time on low wages (if he gets paid at all), working supplementary menial jobs, and indulging in sporadic bouts of heavy drinking to drown his self-doubt.
While there are just enough glimpses of success and professional satisfaction to keep him motivated, Bryant’s career suffers because of his unwillingness to put in the extra training he knows is necessary to improve and impress, and because of his chronic pre-game nerves. His crippling fear of making an error and costing his team the game – a full-time burden that only a goalkeeper has to bear – leads to a debilitating, and undiagnosed, stomach condition that he carries with him for years and which only subsides when he steps back from football. Making a comeback for the Lions in his 30s after being lured by the prospect of $50 a game just for sitting on the bench, Bryant suddenly finds he is the first-choice keeper and writes: “My gut rippled with excitement and dread, a feeling I hadn’t had in years. Nothing about it was pleasant.” When he plays well, he’s above all else “relieved that I hadn’t made an idiot of myself”.
However, there’s far more to this book than the author’s insecurities. This is a finely written chronicle of butt-end semi-pro football, its moronic dressing-room culture, the tedium of travel, the philosophy of goalkeeping, the political perils of ever-changing coaches and team-mates and the constant, pressing need to prove yourself, game after game, only to realise after several years that “being part of a team… apparently didn’t suit my personality”. Being a writer, though, clearly does.
1958-68
by Iain McCartney
Amberley Books, £25
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 320 October 2013
Whatever the other flaws of Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68, you can’t accuse Iain McCartney of not putting in the hard yards. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s 350 pages in length: that figure could easily have been considerably higher, had the typesetter been only slightly more generous with the font size and spacing.
Books on the Munich disaster aren’t hard to come by. McCartney himself already has one to his credit, a well-reviewed biography of Roger Byrne, the United captain who died in the crash with 22 other people. This one is clearly his final word on the subject. Each page is crammed full of microscopic detail, from George Best’s car windscreen being defaced with lipstick by a lovelorn female fan, to the price of touted tickets for the Cup final, to assistant manager Jimmy Murphy’s preferred at-home listening (Chopin and Grieg).
McCartney must effectively have lived in the cuttings library for months to amass this much material. In its own way, the deluge of information reaches critical mass – and it’s not helped by the lack of subheadings to break up the text, meaning that the whole thing feels like a slog at times.
We all already know the narrative: the emotional aftershock of the crash, the slow rebuilding, the many painful defeats, the shaping of talented young players into gods of the game, the regaining of the title in 1965, won again two years later, the coronation against Benfica in 1968. McCartney uses the 1963 FA Cup final, in which United beat Leicester 3-1, as the turning point. The team narrowly avoided relegation that same month, finishing 19th, with many players still not psychologically recovered from Munich, dressing-room recriminations abounding (Noel Cantwell reputedly led the player-power faction) and Jack Crompton’s coaching methods being soundly criticised. It’s a reminder of how easily everything could have turned out differently.
With so much information crammed in, the prose tends towards the dryly matter-of-fact. Perhaps unavoidably, it settles into a laundry-list of match after match and win after win (though it never resorts to the Lego-brick approach of David Peace’s scarcely readable Red Or Dead). At times, it reads as if it were written in the late 1950s themselves. Perhaps this is McCartney’s way of getting into the spirit of the thing, eschewing the pseudy floweriness of so much current football writing for a just-the-facts approach that better suits the subject matter. Or perhaps that’s just the way he writes: not having read the Byrne book, it’s difficult to tell.
Despite its occasional drabness, it’s not hard to imagine Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68 becoming the set text on the subject matter. If nothing else, it’s a remarkable feat of research and hugely admirable as an important contribution to the historical record – even if it’s not always easy to love as a piece of writing.
A year on the road
for Soccer Saturday
by Johnny Phillips
Bennion Kearny, £9.99
Reviewed by David Harrison
From WSC 320 October 2013
Johnny Phillips is a product of Sky’s Soccer Saturday conveyor belt constructed to provide Jeff Stelling with a never-ending stock of earnest reporters, ready to update the nation with breathless goalflashes. That was until Phillips briefly lost it on-air at the end of last season and went from calmly “delivering his own brand of footballing brilliance”, as Stelling’s foreword generously describes our man’s contribution, to a demented comedy figure screaming a match update in a ludicrous high-pitched falsetto. Those 20 seconds in May elevated him, we’re told, to “an internet sensation with millions of hits”.
To be fair that Watford v Leicester play-off semi-final did deliver the most extraordinary climax and Phillips performed manfully, albeit squeakily, to keep it together and provide any sort of factual assessment, what with flares going off and a fair old pitch invasion gathering pace behind him.
In many ways those Vicarage Road scenes served as a perfect bookend to the season Phillips had enjoyed as he travelled the land on behalf of Sky. The cynic might suggest that if you’re about to release a season-long diary, national exposure along those lines does no harm. But whatever criticisms one may choose to level at this undemanding tome, cynicism would not feature.
Phillips has chronologically documented 24 trips he made during the course of last season, starting in August with a delightful little story about how celebrity Spireite the Duke of Devonshire invited his local team to train within the magnificent 100-acre gardens of his Derbyshire ancestral seat, Chatsworth House. What Capability Brown would have thought is anyone’s guess but it’s a charming tale with which to set the ball rolling.
What follows is distinctly mixed but this is the archetypal bedside book, in that the reader could happily flip from one month to the next and back. There are short stories based around key characters within smaller clubs who rarely make headlines – the likes of Fleetwood, Mansfield, Forest Green and Met Police – as well as tales of football people.
The chapter on Brentford’s troubled goalkeeper Richard Lee is revealing if hardly original and the story of Port Talbot ambulance driver and former Swansea striker James Thomas is another pleasing read, while the piece on Lee Hendrie is refreshingly upbeat. The most interesting essay covers the rise and fall of Gretna, intertwined with the story of the club’s late benefactor, the extraordinary Brooks Mileson.
Phillips is a Wolves fan and indulges himself to some degree with a reflective piece on his lengthy relationship with them but the section on finding his club and recollections of 1980’s terrace life will strike a chord with many. This is no Sports Book of the Year contender. Some of the grammar is painful – “The esteem in which he [Benítez] is held by Liverpool fans is considerably high” is a particularly gruesome example – but it’s nevertheless an engaging effort with nothing to dislike about the author. The book, we’re told, was conceived on a train journey from South Wales to London. It could be read within a similar timespan – and there’s nothing wrong with that.